A review by siria
The Queen's Man by Sharon Kay Penman

2.0

Serviceable. Queen's Man is readable—a medieval murder mystery that's good for reading in bed when you're trying to turn your brain off enough in order to sleep—but the characters are stock and the writing is rather wooden. The period setting is mostly okay, but the attempts at writing the dialogue in some sort of faux medieval idiom was painful—the characters tend not to speak in contractions, and I think I started to develop a facial tic every time someone said "for certes." Probably it's a mistake to read fiction set in the period you research for a living, but oh well. My search for a well-written novel (series) set in medieval Europe continues.